Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish: 

The politics of oil is a murky and dangerous business.  It involves unacceptable moral compromises, increases tensions in the world, forms a tight squeeze around US foreign policy.

Remember that this is an administration dominated by the energy industry.  One of its primary goals is to secure oil and gas for the US economy.  And the world has changed.  No longer the singular pole in a unipolar world, the US faces some major economic competitors now and the situation only grows murkier and more dangerous. A few tidbits from the New York Times helps frame the picture.

China’s President Hu Jintao, after passing through the US, and meeting a White House chill, went to Africa.  In Nigeria he signed a deal to buy up a large share of a big oil field in that country.  Then on to Kenya where he signed a deal with the government to receive licenses for the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation “to explore for oil off the coast of Kenya.”  China is also making investments in Sudan, a real human rights favorite in the world right now.  (Unfortunately, I can’t find this article on the NYTimes web site anymore, though it sits in front of me, “China’s Leader Signs Oil Deals With Africans,” by Jim Yardley, May 1).

As you know, there are some human rights issues with these countries, but China is keeping its oil deals free of politics right now, citing “the principle of noninterference in others’ internal affairs,” which means turning a blind eye to things like genocide, government repression of dissidents, corruption, local insurgencies and the like.

What can we do about it?  Not much, apparently.  One reason is that China remains one of this country’s largest creditors, holding a good chunk of our foreign debt.

According to the Times article, China’s state-controlled media underscored “the enormous emphasis the government places on securing energy supplies to support the country’s rapidly growing economy.”

China has pursued deals like this in Latin America as well, one of those contacts being a Bush administration favorite, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, whose government the US attempted to overthrow, despite its popular support.

But there is no US moral high ground here.  Last week, Vice President Cheney, mastermind of the Bush administration’s energy policy (more oil, more war for oil, more guaranteed US access to international reserves and pipelines), was in Kazakhstan, which boasts a rather corrupt government with questionable democratic credentials, “to promote export routes that bypass Russia and directly supply the West.”

The May 6 Times article which is cited here describes the situation as “a messy geopolitical struggle for energy and influence in the countries of the former Soviet Union, rapidly becoming one of the world’s largest [oil and gas] producing regions.”  And there are several fairly nasty governments in that region just waiting to make a deal.

Cheney and Bush would like pipelines to bypass Russia, which is also becoming a bit heavy-handed in its efforts to wrest control of oil and gas resources and pipelines.  You probably noticed that politics between the US and Russia has been getting a bit nasty lately, with Cheney providing the diplomatic fireworks, attacking Russia publicly for its human rights problems.

Well, he’s one to speak, isn’t he?  Yes, and while in Kazakhstan, he offered an unqualified endorsement, reports the Times, for the government of Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, who just won a third term as president in an election marked as “flawed” by international observers.

Meanwhile, Russia’s natural gas monopoly, Gazprom, is facing the reality of declining natural gas fields in the Arctic and, “is growing increasingly reliant on Central Asian natural gas fields.”

And then there’s Turkmenistan, “wedged between Iran and Kazakhstan,” which “has some of the world’s largest reserves of natural gas.”  So if you want to blunt Russia’s growing muscular foreign policy, here’s one place to wage diplomatic, economic, and other [?] battle.

Well, read the article.  You’ll get a sense of the growing tension and looming conflict between the US and Russia over energy.  This is not small stakes stuff here.  Wars have historically been fought over such things, and when you add to this picture what is going on in Iraq, Iran, and the whole Persian Gulf region – well, you see what I mean.

Now the answer is not to drill every wildlife refuge and off any available shore in the US, wherever dwindling oil reserves may be found, in a false belief that this can somehow make us less dependent on foreign oil.  That will only threaten more ecological devastation, and no remaining oil reserve in the US can supply enough to make any real difference.  And anyway, continuing fossil fuel based consumption will only continue the carbon emissions that are still the leading cause of human-induced global warming.

We do not right now have the government that will lead us out of this impasse.  As I wrote before, it is time to separate the fossil fuel industries from the US government.  Oil industry-led government has only increased the risks of destructive climate change, political instability, war and chaos.

Today, Thomas Friedman, with whom I often disagree, wrote about this, saying we have entered the post-post-cold-war era, a multipolar world “where US power is being checked from every corner.”  Wealth and power is growing in the countries where the oil is.  As supply continues to tighten and shrink in the face of growing demand, those with the oil will have a lot of power over those who need it.

We could have done this differently.  We could have begun transitioning from an oil-based, automobile-based society to one more sustainable and adaptable to the reality of resource depletion – but the society kept voting for a sunny future that could put off the hard decisions forever.

Well, here they are, the hard decisions.  Are we ready yet?